A reliable and cost-efficient auto-scaling system for web applications using heterogeneous spot instances

Abstract

Cloud providers sell their idle capacity on markets through an auction-like mechanism to increase their return on investment. The instances sold in this way are called spot instances. In spite that spot instances are usually 90% cheaper than on-demand instances, they can be terminated by provider when their bidding prices are lower than market prices. Thus, they are largely used to provision fault-tolerant applications only. In this paper, we explore how to utilize spot instances to provision web applications, which are usually considered as availability-critical. The idea is to take advantage of differences in price among various types of spot instances to reach both high availability and s..